Stress

Browsing posts in Stress

Much Appreciated

Mr. B. believed he had made billions of dollars creating an entertainment park in Saudi Arabia. With the money he had bought the hospital where he now resided on the inpatient psychiatric unit. He was very distressed that we had dismantled his stem-cell research lab in the hospital cafeteria, and routinely reported to me how […]

Last Weekend I Went to New York City

Last weekend I went to New York City. I always stay across from the World Trade Towers, and always feel a little sad and bewildered at the gravity of what occurred. There, amidst the life and movement rests the two large ever-flowing pools that memorialize the people lost, even as the two new buildings grow […]

Battlestar Galactica and Stress

I started watching the old series Battlestar Galactica. After creating a population of robotic workers, those same machines rose up and attacked their makers. A brutal war ensued, but eventually the robots left the planet, only to return in a surprise attack 40 years later. The last bastion of human kind is left to fight […]

Squirrel and Stress

As I was fueling myself for the day I saw out my window a squirrel already hard at work. The rapid movement caught my attention, and I noticed the squirrel was deftly bouncing from branch to branch vertically up a pine tree. In its mouth were held what appeared to be a random bunch of […]

No Way Did I Want to Die

A few weeks ago Erich Engelhardt and I posted a series of blogs about the adolescent brain, its development, and the implications for addictions. In sum, the brain matures in such a way that, for a period of time when we are in our teens, our impulses and feelings often overwhelm the part of our […]

So why is this stress thing so important?

So why is this stress thing so important? Let’s think about the different domains where stress occurs and why it makes a difference if there is less stress. We are all the product of evolution. To move from one generation to the next we had to survive long enough to have children, getting our genetic […]

RECENT FROM THE BLOG

Let me flash-back to 1982. I had graduated from Sarah Lawrence College two years earlier in 1980 with a BA in Liberal Arts.
But in 1982, I decided I wanted to be a physician, and enrolled in the Columbia School of General Studies while continuing...

I read an intriguing article today by Kurth and Haussmann, two researchers of ADHD out of Colorado. They are interested in isolating specific risk factors that may account for the dramatic increase in ADHD over the last several decades. The...

In the context of pruning and the "use it or lose it" model, addiction is like a pathway. It may start out as a mere amble through the woods, a poorly defined trail, but can end up like a super highway with few exits. Drugs are the vehicles that drive that road, and every new...